Tuesday

Apr.
8, 2003

Your Ways, Father

Poem:"Your
Ways, Father," by Nancy Frederiksen from Coming up for Air (Paper
Jack Creek Press).

Your Ways, Father

Your sullen looks, the crabapple
dismissal when I'd win
too many games

the grumbling from your chair
and the wait for a quarter
I knew you would give

but the suspense that held
us captive until you would give it up
like a gold medallion we were to
treasure.

It was spent, quickly spent
on movies and candy. Gone.

But not forgotten
is the suspense.

We learned to think of it as love.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of editor and
publisher Robert Giroux, born in New Jersey, (1914). He wanted to be
a journalist, but as a student at Columbia he became interested in literature,
inspired by the professors Mark Van Doren and Raymond Weaver. The first major
author that Giroux discovered was Jean Stafford. While traveling by train to
Connecticut, Giroux took Stafford's manuscript at random from his briefcase,
and became so absorbed in reading it that he rode past his stop. When he got
to know Jean Stafford, she introduced him to her then little-known husband Robert
Lowell, whose first collection of poems had been published privately by a small
house and had gone largely unnoticed. Giroux snatched him up, and he became
one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Lowell then introduced
him to a young woman named Flannery O'Conner, whom he also published. During
his long career he published Carl Sandburg, Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, and
T.S. Eliot. Giroux said, "When you look at work by someone never published,
you always hope to pick up a manuscript you cannot put down."

It's the birthday of journalist Seymour
Hersh, born in Chicago, Illinois (1937). He got into journalism after
he flunked out of law school. The Chicago City News Bureau was hiring almost
anyone with a college degree, so he took the job. He started as a copy boy and
then became a police reporter. Once he went to investigate a case in which two
police officers reported that a prisoner had tried to escape and they'd shot
him. Hersh ran down to the police garage because he wanted to interview the
cops first and write a good story. When he arrived on the scene he heard the
cops talking and one said, "Yeah, I told him he was free, and he started
running down the alley, and I plugged him." He couldn't quite believe what
he'd heard, so he waited a little while, checked the police report, and the
coroner's report said bullets in the back. But he never wrote the story. Everybody
told him not to. Bad things would happen to someone who took on the Chicago
police department. In the late 1960's he got a tip from a lawyer who worked
with military deserters that American soldiers had massacred an entire village
in Vietnam, killing all the men, women, and children. He followed up on it and
broke the story of what is now known as the My Lai massacre. At first, none
of the national newspapers or magazines would publish the story. He sent the
story by Western Union to more than fifty local newspapers and they started
to publish it, but the major media outlets still wouldn't touch the story. Finally,
Hersh wrote about a witness of the massacre, a farm kid from a small town in
Indiana named Paul Meadlo, who believed that he and the other soldiers had committed
an evil act and would be punished by God. Meadlo was interviewed on the nightly
news and the My Lai massacre became common knowledge in America. Hersh won the
Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the story. He went on to write books including
The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), and The
Dark Side of Camelo (1997).

It's the birthday of novelist Barbara
Kingsolver, born in Annapolis, Maryland (1955). At an early age her
family moved to rural Kentucky, where her father was the county physician. When
she was in the second grade, she moved to Africa with her family, where her
father worked for almost a year as a physician in the Congo. It was in Africa
that she began her lifelong habit of keeping a journal. She said, "what
I feel is that writing is the thing that makes my experience real to me."
Her experience in Africa partially inspired her book The Poisonwood Bible
(1998), about the wife and four daughters of an evangelical Baptist minister
who go as missionaries to the Belgian Congo in 1959. In the novel she wrote,
"We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into
the jungle. My sisters and I were all counting on having one birthday apiece
during our twelve-month mission. 'And heaven knows,' our mother predicted, 'they
won't have Betty Crocker in the Congo.'" She's also the author of The
Bean Trees (1988), Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993)
and her most recent, Prodigal Summer (2001), about a rural farming family
in Southern Appalachia.

On this day in 1935, Congress approved the Works
Progress Administration (WPA), the national works program created by
President Franklin Roosevelt to relieve the economic hardship of the Great Depression.
The program employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.4 million public projects
before it was disbanded in 1943. The Federal Writers' Project, a special project
within the WPA, employed many well-known writers including Nelson Algren, Saul
Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, May Swenson, Margaret
Walker, and Richard Wright. The Federal Writers' Project's best-known undertaking
is a series of state guidebooks, about life in various regions of the United
States.

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Although he has edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound forges a new path for Garrison Keillor, as a poet of light verse.
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